Wayward Souls review – Dark Souls on your phone

The makers of Mage Gauntlet try to create a Dark Souls style experience on your iPhone, but are the touchscreen controls up to it?

As offensively absurd as it was to see the makers of Candy Crush Saga trying to trademark the word ‘saga’ you could sort of see their point. Their intended solution was monstrous but for any aspiring clone all you have to do is add the words ‘candy’ or ‘saga’ to your game and it’d seem to many less observant players as if it’s an official part of the series. This sort of thing has been going on for decades, and so the first thing many will think of when they see a game called Wayward Souls is Dark Souls. Which is clearly entirely intentional and… largely deserved.

Of course there’s no official connection between the two games, and even the gameplay similarities are more philosophical than literal, but if From Software ever were to make a 2D touchscreen game it’s hard not to think it wouldn’t turn out something like this.

While not a sequel Wayward Souls is a loose follow-up to developer RocketCat’s previous game Mage Gauntlet, which if you haven’t come across before you can probably guess is a… Gauntlet clone. Wayward Souls is much more than a straight action game though and essentially a real-time roguelike, complete with permadeath and a sky-high difficultly level. Which of course is pretty close to a description of Dark Souls, with both games sharing a similar ancestry rather than one being a copy of the other.

Although there are six character classes in Wayward Souls three of them have to be unlocked, and since they all have their own backstories and dialogue this ends up being quite the reward to strive for. The starter trio though are the slow but powerful fighter, ranged combat specialist the mage, and the agile rogue.

The enemies you’re arrayed against aren’t equipped with anything but bog standard artificial intelligence but they are unusually competent for video game foes, swarming you in crowds and keeping their distance if they have ranged weapons. When you die, as is roguelike tradition, you lose all your equipment, so a second’s hesitation or mistake is all it takes to suddenly waste an hour’s worth of progress.

Wayward Souls (iOS) – death is forever

You do get to keep any money you’ve collected though and this can be used to upgrade your character before you start, ensuring that your efforts are not entirely wasted. You can also upgrade weapons as you progress, but of course these are lost as soon as you die. The levels are randomly generated too, so you can’t count advance knowledge of the layout as a benefit when you try again.

Many gamers will be used to such harsh punishments by now but the reason games like Dark Souls get away with it is that the controls are beyond reproach and it’s always made very clear it’s your fault you’ve died, not the games. Wayward Souls controls much better than you’d expect for a touchscreen game but it’s still not quite as good as it needs to be.

Moving around is fine but the swipes needed to attack and block don’t always seem to register properly, and it’s surprising that there are no virtual button shortcuts for your special abilities. There’s a seemingly purposeful pause after each attack, which is predictable and thus manageable, but together with the rarity of health positions this seems to push the difficulty level too far in the bad guys’ favour.

It’s not enough to ruin the experience, and the fault is clearly with the hardware not the game, but we can’t help thinking that the promised PC version might end up being the definitive one as a result.

In the meantime though this is still one of the best iOS action adventures of recent months and it’s difficult to imagine any similar game working any better. The 16-bit style visuals are excellent and like the very best SNES and Mega Drive games manages to weave a dense and foreboding atmosphere despite the ostensibly cute visuals.

Even with superior titles like this it’s always strange to think that a format so unsuited to playing video games has become so influential. If Wayward Souls was a 3DS or PS Vita game there’s be no problems with the controls at all and we’d probably be extolling it as a minor classic. As it is it’s just another great game that suffers from the compromise of appearing on the world’s most popular gaming format.

In Short: Perhaps the closest there’ll ever be to a portable version of Dark Souls, but the unreliable controls make the punishing difficulty harder to bare.

Pros: Great visuals and atmosphere, with a good variety of enemies, equipment, and randomly-generated level layouts. Surprisingly engrossing story and characters.

Cons: The controls are more reliable than most touchscreen action games, but that’s not enough when the game is so ruthlessly difficult as this. Scarcity of health potions is particularly perverse.